“Here's what Phil Jones of the CRU and his colleague
Michael Mann of Penn State mean by "peer review".
When Climate Research published a paper dissenting from
the Jones-Mann "consensus," Jones demanded that
the journal "rid itself of this troublesome editor,"
and Mann advised that "we have to stop considering
Climate Research as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal.
Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate
research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers.”
[Quoted from ocregister.com]

Mark Steynis
free to write for whom he wishes, so why not Jones and Mann?

Meanwhile, just about no-one is meeting
Kyoto. Do you really believe Copenhagen will pan out much
differently?

Anyone who believe the tosh about the reliability
of ‘peer review’ has never done serious research.
The ‘peer reviewed journals’ are just specialist
and in-house magazines. If someone doesn’t get their
rubbish published, they are just as likely to start another
magazine with them as editor! And then try to charge outrageous
amounts for copies or articles.

You cannot rely on anyone, let alone the
‘peer reviewed mag.s’. You have to cross check
and cross check and cross check and still you canno't be certain
sure.

In this situation, that there are some
idiots behaving like idiots does not ‘disprove’
anthropogenic
global warming [AGW] any more than it ‘proves’
it, and Steyn falls straight into that mind trap. Good science
and reasoning is hard. That is why so few are much good at
it, and Steyn is not one of them. He is just a useful voice
among millions.

Go spend a few months reading the psychological
‘journals’ or the pharmaceutical ‘journals’,
or the logic ‘journals’. It’s the same the
whole world over, most of it is pap.

Or go and look at publishing 300 years
ago. Much of it is fourth form schoolboy tripe, most of it
has long been burned. All most people now remember is Shakespeare
and a few others. It will be exactly the same with the ‘journals’.
Only some nerd like me will still be hunting out or collecting
such stuff in 300 years, long after a bit of allegedly ‘lost’
data from the CRU is long forgotten. Why those reading this
article in 300 years will not even know what CRU stands for,
and that will be really irritating!

“And that's what Andrew Revkin did, week in, week
out: He took the words out of Michael Mann's mouth and served
them up to impressionable readers of the New York Times
and opportunist politicians around the world champing at
the bit to inaugurate a vast global regulatory body to confiscate
trillions of dollars of your hard-earned wealth in the cause
of "saving the planet" from an imaginary crisis
concocted by a few dozen thuggish ideologues. If you fall
for this after the revelations of the past week, you're
as big a dupe as Begley or Revkin.”

“The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
in its 4th Assessment Report (AR4) published in 2007 concluded
that the warming of the climate system was unequivocal.
This conclusion was based not only on the observational
temperature record, although this is the key piece of evidence,
but on multiple strands of evidence. These factors include:
long-term retreat of glaciers in most alpine regions of
the world; reductions in the area of the Northern Hemisphere
(NH) snow cover during the spring season; reductions in
the length of the freeze season in many NH rivers and lakes;
reduction in Arctic sea-ice extent in all seasons, but especially
in the summer; increases in global average sea level since
the 19th century; increases in the heat content of the ocean
and warming of temperatures in the lower part of the atmosphere
since the late 1950s.

“CRU [Climatic Research Unit] has also been involved
in reconstructions of temperature (primarily for the Northern
Hemisphere) from proxy data (non-instrumental sources such
as tree rings, ice cores, corals and documentary records).
Similar temperature reconstructions have been developed
by numerous other groups around the world. The level of
uncertainty in this indirect evidence for temperature change
is much greater than for the picture of temperature change
shown by the instrumental data. But different reconstructions
of temperature change over a longer period, produced by
different researchers using different methods, show essentially
the same picture of highly unusual warmth across the NH
during the 20th century. The principal conclusion from these
studies (summarized in IPCC AR4) is that the second half
of the 20th century was very likely (90% probable) warmer
than any other 50-year period in the last 500 years and
likely (66% probable) the warmest in the past 1300 years.”

This is a 466 page .pdf and has
enough for all but the most enthusiastic excavator.
you can search it on terms like ‘tree’ or ‘tree
ring’ or ‘Mann’ if you don’t want
to read 466 pages ☺

“McIntyre and McKitrick (2003) reported that they
were unable to replicate the results of Mann et al. (1998).
Wahl and Ammann (2007) showed that this was a consequence
of differences in the way McIntyre and McKitrick (2003)
had implemented the method of Mann et al. (1998) and that
the original reconstruction could be closely duplicated
using the original proxy data. McIntyre and McKitrick (2005a,b)
raised further concerns about the details of the Mann et
al. (1998) method, principally relating to the independent
verification of the reconstruction against 19th-century
instrumental temperature data and to the extraction of the
dominant modes of variability present in a network of western
North American tree ring chronologies, using Principal Components
Analysis. The latter may have some theoretical foundation,
but Wahl and Amman (2006) also show that the impact on the
amplitude of the final reconstruction is very small (~0.05°C;
for further discussion of these issues see also Huybers,
2005; McIntyre and McKitrick, 2005c,d; von Storch and Zorita,
2005).”
—
“ Much of the evidence used by Lamb was drawn from
a very diverse mixture of sources such as historical information,
evidence of treeline and vegetation changes, or records
of the cultivation of cereals and vines. He also drew inferences
from very preliminary analyses of some Greenland ice core
data and European tree ring records. Much of this evidence
was difficult to interpret in terms of accurate quantitative
temperature influences. Much was not precisely dated, representing
physical or biological systems that involve complex lags
between forcing and response, as is the case for vegetation
and glacier changes. Lamb’s analyses also predate
any formal statistical calibration of much of the evidence
he considered. He concluded that ‘High Medieval’
temperatures were probably 1.0°C to 2.0°C above
early 20th-century levels at various European locations
(Lamb, 1977; Bradley et al., 2003a).

“A later study, based on examination of more quantitative
evidence, in which efforts were made to control for accurate
dating and specific temperature response, concluded that
it was not possible to say anything other than ‘…
in some areas of the Globe, for some part of the year, relatively
warm conditions may have prevailed’ (Hughes and Diaz,
1994).”

And much much more to delight those who
prefer reality to fossil media and denialist hysteria.

Note the black lines towards the end of the tree ring surveys, which represent
real temperatures. This represents attempts to examine the viability of tree rings as surrogates/proxies
for measured temperatures.

“Over 95% of the CRU climate data set concerning
land surface temperatures has been accessible to climate
researchers, sceptics and the public for several years
the University of East Anglia has confirmed.”

Also:

“The University will make all the data accessible
as soon as they are released from a range of non-publication
agreements. Publication will be carried out in collaboration
with the Met Office Hadley Centre.”

end note

“As McIntyre points out: “YAD061 reaches
8 sigma and is the most influential tree in the world.”
”[Quoted from wattsupwiththat.com]

More
on the tree ring saga:
“ McIntyre therefore prepared a revised dataset,
replacing Briffa's selected 12 cores with the 34 from
Khadyta River. The revised chronology was simply staggering.
The sharp uptick in the series at the end of the twentieth
century had vanished, leaving a twentieth century apparently
without a significant trend. The blade of the Yamal
hockey stick, used in so many of those temperature reconstructions
that the IPCC said validated Michael Mann's work, was
gone.”

“
"We've long known that on a small scale, DNA is
a double helix," [...] "But if the double
helix didn't fold further, the genome in each cell would
be two meters long. Scientists have not really understood
how the double helix folds to fit into the nucleus of
a human cell, which is only about a hundredth of a millimeter
in diameter. This new approach enabled us to probe exactly
that question."

“The researchers report two striking findings.
First, the human genome is organized into two separate
compartments, keeping active genes separate and accessible
while sequestering unused DNA in a denser storage compartment.
Chromosomes snake in and out of the two compartments
repeatedly as their DNA alternates between active, gene-rich
and inactive, gene-poor stretches.”
—
“The specific architecture the scientists found,
called a "fractal globule," enables the cell
to pack DNA incredibly tightly -- the information density
in the nucleus is trillions of times higher than on
a computer chip -- while avoiding the knots and tangles
that might interfere with the cell's ability to read
its own genome. Moreover, the DNA can easily unfold
and refold during gene activation, gene repression,
and cell replication.”

“In preliminary testing of Discover’s Nehalem
processors, NASA climate simulations performed up to
twice as fast per processor compared with other nationally
recognized high-end computing systems. The new computational
capabilities also allowed NASA climate scientists to
run high-resolution simulations that reproduced atmospheric
features not previously seen in their models.

“For instance, "features such as well-defined
hurricane eyewalls and convective cloud clusters appeared
for the first time," said William Putman.”
—
“In August, Goddard added 4,128 new-generation
Intel "Nehalem" processors to its Discover
high-end computing system. The upgraded Discover will
serve as the centerpiece of a new climate simulation
capability at Goddard. Discover will host NASA’s
modeling contributions to the Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change (IPCC), the leading scientific organization
for assessing climate change, and other national and
international climate initiatives.

“To further enhance Discover’s capabilities,
Goddard will install another 4,128 Nehalem processors
in the fall, bringing Discover to 15,160 processors.”

While the medieval Taliban are being
castrated, so’s that females may come and men may
enter the 21st century...

“Nine years ago, Robert J. Nowak, an electro-chemicals
expert for the Defense Dept., learned that senior generals
weren't happy with their troops' electronic gear. While
the night-vision, laser, and GPS devices worked well,
the batteries that powered them weighed some 25 pounds
per soldier, heavy enough to hurt some of the troops.

“So Nowak, who worked at the Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Defense Dept.'s
famous research branch, solicited bids for a new device
that would power a soldier's gear at a tenth of the
weight and a fraction of the $100 cost of the batteries.
Today, the original 18 companies that took up Nowak's
challenge have been whittled down to two: Livermore
(Calif.)-based UltraCell and Adaptive Materials of Ann
Arbor, Mich. Their solution: small, sturdy fuel cells
that can power a soldier's clutch of mobile devices
for a week on a gallon or so of methanol or propane.
Battle-ready versions of the fuel cells will be available
this year.”

“But here’s the odd thing. Many plants
that live in places prone to fire are highly flammable
- more flammable than plants that live elsewhere.
This has led some to speculate that these plants
have actually evolved to cause fires: that they
'want' fire, and have evolved features that make
it more likely that a spark will become a flame,
and a flame will become a fire. I call this the
torch-me hypothesis.”

“...ridges in the plant’s giant leaves actually
collect water and channel it down to the plant’s root
system, harvesting up to 16 times more water than any other
plant in the region.”
—
“Some scientists say the desert rhubarb isn’t
all that [unusual], however. “Many plants channel
water to their base to be absorbed by the root,” Lindy
Brigham, a plant ecologist from the University of Arizona,
wrote in an email. “Just look at the way plant leaves
are shaped and how they branch from the base in many cases.”
The architecture of the desert rhubarb’s leaves is
unusual, she said, but not necessarily the only example
of this adaptation.”